Y-2 Yùn - 40t, TRO3145:CCAF
All proposed fan-variants should be posted in the corresponding “FotW Workshop” thread.No image available at the time of writing. But believe me: FlyingDebris did it again. O0
Mujika’s fighter builds upon the concept of air-deployed infantry pioneered by the Troika. Unlike its predecessor, the stealthy Yùn is capable of penetrating enemy airspace while delivering a squad of battle armor to any target point.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard that the
Troika had
anything to do with troop-drops, but there was certainly room for that to have changed in the three-score years between the close of the Jihad and the opening of the current era. [shrug] Regardless, the Capellan Confederation is not the least ashamed of its enduring reputation for taking ‘oblique approaches’ to military advantage, rather than the classic force-on-force match-up, and the
Yùn is another brick in building that tradition. Most forces deploy battle-armour with VTOLs, or deep-strike spec-ops troops with shuttles; whatever else it may be, the CCAF certainly is not ‘most forces’. So what do they get for the job? An aerospace fighter.
Now, troop-delivery is not an operational tasking that requires high combat-performance (I’ll discuss that below), so the forty-ton
Yùn mounts a 120SFE to develop a relatively modest 5/8 thrust curve off five tons of fuel - nothing to write home about for its weight-class, but certainly good enough for the atmospheric/sub-orbital hops and short-range dashes that its designed purpose requires. Eight-point-five tons of stealth(!) armour provide a 43/34/25 profile that is vulnerable to thresholding crit-checks from medium lasers (and other five-point clusters) across all but its nose; that’s not great, but the stealth modifiers do cut down on the effective fire you’re likely to take, and let’s face it, if a
Yùn is taking concentrated fire while attempting to deliver its ‘precious cargo’ of commandos, UR DOIN IT WRONG. The heat-burden of the stealth armour requires a little respect, so the designers included twelve DHS to cover that and the defensive armament - an ERML and twin Streak-6 launchers in the nose, backed by a ton of ammunition each. The stealth armour requires an EW suite of some sort, so the aft-mounted GECM is no real surprise, and finally, the reason for the
Yùn’s existence: a four-ton cargo/infantry compartment, room enough for a full squad of light or medium battle-armour, like the nasty, vicious Amazon suits which also debuted in this TRO installment. }:)
If and when you get ahold of
TRO3145:CCAF yourself, pay close attention to the Deployment and Notable Pilots section. During the Battle of New Syrtis, Warrior House Hiritsu used two full squadrons of
Yùns for a
coup-de-main attack on a key defensive position, dropping their troops directly on AFFS gun-positions, then returning to TAG key targets for guided artillery and missile-fire from the CCAF siege-lines and to immobilise defending vehicles with salvoes of SSRMs. On Talcott,
Sao-shao Amy Yao was so determined to get her passengers exactly where they needed to go that she flew
into the target building and breached an interior wall with her missiles before she dropped them off, giving them a near-direct run at their objective. :o
I’m not saying that every hop by a
Yùn needs to be so, um,
audacious in reaching optimal DZs, but this is a platform for
delivering troops to key targets, not mixing it up with fighters lovingly designed for air-superiority missions. The design compromises that go with making an ASF capable of delivering battle-armour decently well mean that the Y-2 is too slow, too thinly-armoured, and frankly too under-armed for that kind of nonsense.
Yùn contingents need to be routed far clear of meaningful opposition and enemy fighters kept busy by your own so the Y-2s can complete their missions unmolested, letting their BA squads hit the targets that will turn the ground-campaign your way. Remember the
fundamentals, and all that.
Matters don't get much better when you look at the
Yùn’s external warload capacity: eight ‘slots’ of ordnance at 3/5 is just too slow for safety in the age of XLFE- and XXLFE-powered starfighters, and there are far better (and cheaper!) platforms for delivering such ordnance, like the
Katya. I wouldn’t even recommend carrying a couple of Light AAMs for self-defence, because if the airspace is likely to be contested to the degree that you need them in the first place, you should be taking along escorts that are carrying them (and even more weaponry)
for you. The
Yùn is essentially an intra-system bus for the black-ops jokers; its drivers need to stick to what they do best and leave the ‘hero’ shit for the jokers with the big watches, straight teeth, and crooked grins. ::)
Conversely, if you can get a couple of flights of intereceptors or dogfighters past the escorts and amongst a gaggle of
Yùns on their way to their targets, those zoomies are going to have a high old time, like the ‘Stuka parties’ of WW2: the
Yùn is too slow to outrun anything, too frail to stand up to heavy fire (even spamming MLs or ERMLs from the stern-quarter will break a lot of things), and its passengers are too specialised and valuable to the other side’s battle-plan to be present in large numbers. Smoking a Y-2 loaded with Death Commandos or Warrior House spec-ops troopers is a relatively easy task that takes some pretty significant and rare SF manpower out of the CCAF’s Order of Battle.
From the ground-forces perspective, surrounding likely targets with a ring or two of
Partisans or similar will do a lot to discourage repeats of the New Syrtis or Talcott incident noted above. Using the threat of ‘lawn-dart’ checks to force
Yùn-deployed BA to approach their targets overland, rather than dropping directly ont heir targets, will make the ground-defence’s job of deterring or killing them a great deal easier.
Again, being that the ship is so new to canon and so near-optimal for what it’s intended to do, I shan’t mess with it, but I’m going to create a Workshop for other people who just can’t resist the temptation to fiddle with things. If you do break out the drawing-board and calculator, let us know how your ‘better’ version works out in play!
All proposed fan-variants belong in the corresponding “FotW Workshop” thread: http://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,29681.0.html
